I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.